Building your family tree with Family.Show

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:58:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Tim Sneath, who is a Group Manager and Evangelist at Microsoft, posted about Family.Show which caught my eye. I decided to give it a try. Family.Show is a genealogy application built on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) by a company called Vertigo. Family.Show is a very slick application for building your family tree and tracking your own family history. Tim Sneath also points out that Family.Show is an excellent example of WPF in a "complex, realistic" scenario for developers to take a look at.

In giving Family.Show a try - I discovered I really would like to know more about my family history. I had such a great experience with it I decided to create a small video demo of how Family.Show works in managing and tracking your family tree:

Video: Demo: Family.Show

Forgive the video's abruptness and pace. I didn't want to bore you with filling out a complete family - rather simply to highlight how easy it is to create your family in Family.Show.

The ability to drag and drop images into profiles of family members is an excellent showcase of some of the advantages with building apps with WPF for Windows Vista. But in regards to Family.Show - using WPF allows me to easily navigate through my family tree entering details on family members quickly and efficiently and is not overly complicated for my needs. Family.Show stores your .family files in a directory in your Documents folder which is also easily movable and backed up as well.

Click here to install Family.Show via ClickOnce. You can also view Vertigo's Family.Show site here.

Windows Experience Blog : Genealogy

Building your family tree with Family.Show